


Addiction, Magnetism, Genius

by bluesyturtle



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Possibly Pre-Slash, Post Season 3, Relapse, Timeline What Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 22:54:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4540533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set right after the season 3 finale and follows Marcus trying to ~*~be there~*~ for Sherlock after his relapse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Addiction, Magnetism, Genius

“When did it happen?”

“Yesterday,” Joan tells him, closing the door behind Marcus as he steps inside the brownstone. She holds up a hand to stop him from hanging up his coat. “He’s on the roof, in case you wanted to visit with him first.”

Marcus hesitates and shrugs his coat back on. “Is he okay?”

“I think he’s still trying to process it. He hasn’t said much of anything since he came home.”

“Did he know I was coming over?”

“When he asked me to tell you and Captain Gregson that he relapsed, I said you might want to see him. He didn’t object.”

“Better than nothing, I guess.” He buries his hands uncertainly in his coat pockets, taking care to leave his pity here if he dared to bring any as far as the front door. The last thing Sherlock needs is for Marcus to go up there with a bleeding heart. “I don’t think I even know what to say.”

“He just has to know that we’re here for him. These things happen. That it did to him just proves that he’s human.”

“I bet that’s exactly how he sees it,” he murmurs, at first not meaning it at all but quickly backsliding into concern. “He can’t be happy about that.”

“Can’t be happy about what, Detective?”

Marcus snaps his head up to the stairs. Joan looks over her shoulder before turning to face them directly. A beat passes and Sherlock steps into view, one hand on the rail and the other balled into a loose fist at his side. His head lists slightly to one side and he looks like an absolute wreck from his disheveled hair to the dark circles beneath his eyes. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours.

“I’m not here in an official capacity,” Marcus half-announces, startled into speaking by Sherlock’s plodding, deliberate descent down the stairs. “Joan called, said there had been an incident.”

“An incident.”

Joan looks at Marcus and Marcus regrets that he hadn’t spoken more plainly. Sherlock reaches the final step, stays there for a stretched moment with one foot hovering over the floor, and drops down unceremoniously to their level. His eyes look dull and hollow but for the spark of indignant pain his expression lends to them. Marcus holds his ground.

“She said you relapsed.”

“I permitted her to say as much.”

“Sherlock,” Joan intervenes, cutting the air with a sharp wave of her hand.

Sherlock pulls his lips back in an exaggerated grimace and clicks his tongue. “Tea, Marcus? Coffee?”

He strides dispassionately toward the kitchen, leaving Joan and Marcus behind. She looks at him and opens her mouth. Her phone chimes in her pocket. Marcus waves for her to take the call and takes off his coat before cautiously moving to follow the way Sherlock went.

Behind him on the stairs, he hears Joan saying, “Hi, Ms. Hudson…Yes, he’s fine now…If it’s not too much trouble, I think it could be really good for him. He might need more time…”

Marcus bolsters his courage and steps into the kitchen where Sherlock is standing with his back to him. His focus appears to be singularly transfixed by a teakettle on the stovetop. Sherlock is wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. Marcus can’t remember a time when he ever saw Sherlock looking this unwound. It’s not really something he can politely comment on, given the circumstances. He clears his throat quietly but Sherlock doesn’t look away from the stove.

“Um, I just wanted to tell you that I’m here for you. If you need me to be.”

“If I need you to be,” Sherlock echoes tonelessly. “How exactly do you imagine that scenario playing out? The worst has been dealt with. It’s done.”

“‘Worst’ woulda been you dead by overdose.”

Sherlock does half-turn to meet his eyes for a long, heavy moment. It was a dramatic thing to say, but he can’t sugarcoat a single thing with Sherlock ever, least of all now. The worst thing _would_ have been an overdose. It’s not as if he hasn’t considered it once or twice before as a very real possibility.

“Is that an experience to which you imagine I’ll subject you, Marcus?”

“You already did once.”

Sherlock faces him and tips his chin forward, recognition flashing in his eyes for just a moment like lightning in a bottle—like life, like a challenge, like an idea. The slanted angle to his face darkens his expression and makes his cheeks look sunken and haggard.

“I’ll remind you that that was a ruse designed to lure my nemesis and former inamorata out of hiding. I’ll also remind you that it worked.”

“And the best lies have a little truth in them, right?” Marcus shakes his head, losing his footing but beginning to care less about how it makes him look. “You know what? I can’t believe I came here thinking I might have to walk on eggshells with you.”

“It’s not something I’ve ever asked you to do, is it?” Sherlock snaps, voice creeping up in decibel but not surpassing or even reaching a shout. “You’ve known that this is what I am and I have never once asked you to make allowances for me. In fact, I have only ever demonstrated to you that the way I am is incompatible with the way most other people are.”

Sherlock sucks in a shaky breath, releases it unevenly, and turns his back on Marcus to watch the kettle once more.

“I don’t need to be lectured to know that I fouled it all up yesterday and I certainly don’t require your condescension to put myself back to rights.”

Marcus bites his tongue. He doesn’t even know how he let the discussion swerve so far from acceptable territory. There hadn’t been a plan, but it had never even occurred to him that he might accidentally scold Sherlock Holmes while offering everything but his most deeply felt sentiments—worry, support, and fear.

“You’re right.”

The line of Sherlock’s back goes rigid. His rib cage expands slowly around a long inhale.

“You’re right,” Marcus says again. “I’m sorry.”

“I do tire of cheap victories,” Sherlock confesses in a small, broken voice. “Therein rests the irony of my present situation.”

Sherlock turns a dial on the stove, pours hot water into two cups, and roughly sets the kettle back on the stove. He heaves a deep sigh and offers one cup to Marcus. They sit at the table in a confusing, strangely charged silence. Marcus considers leaving. Perhaps he just isn’t welcome so soon after yesterday. He can’t fault Sherlock for needing more time to himself or with just him and Joan.

“I’m not treating you fairly,” Sherlock blurts out. The fingers of one hand tap a disorganized rhythm against the side of his cup. His other hand is in his pocket clenched into a straining fist. Only the stiff tendons in Sherlock’s wrist make the shape of his hand discernible. “I apologize.”

Marcus shrugs and sips his tea. He affects a more neutral pose and slouches in his seat, saying, “Figures you’d skip the bottling-up stage and go straight to biting my head off.”

Sherlock looks at him. A familiar scowl mars his mouth.

“As opposed to your repressive coping mechanisms.”

“Yeah.” Marcus folds his arms on the table. “No pleasantries for you.”

“You know me better than that by now,” Sherlock mutters, voice too quiet to sound flippant and too weak to sound hopeful. But it isn’t sarcasm.

So Marcus takes a chance.

“I do.”

Sherlock looks up like he’s afraid of what he might see on Marcus’ face, but his reaction, once the weariness, the shock, and the dread fade, is to crack the world’s tiniest smile. The whites of his eyes have turned an irritated red. Marcus tells himself not to overthink anything and reaches for the nearest shoulder to lay his hand upon. He thinks it’s a testament to how worn down Sherlock is that he doesn’t even flinch or look at the offending touch.

Marcus drinks his tea and Sherlock does, too, when he’s ready.

~

Days drag on in the usual fashion of time when every moment must be felt and anguished over. He doesn’t know what he’s waiting for most days, but it all ticks by slowly with the blunted anticipation of someone waiting for no other purpose than to eventually stop waiting.

Marcus recognizes Alfredo at the brownstone one morning before work. He’s there to give Joan a ride to their crime scene and to poke his head in to see Sherlock. The idea is that he just wants to be present for a few seconds before the day takes them away. His proposed few seconds drags into minutes while they wait for Alfredo to join them. Marcus expects Sherlock to be annoyed at the prospect of being babysat, but he’s calm. Joan tides them over telling him bits and pieces of the murder they’re looking into.

Sherlock doesn’t even look curious, but he spouts out some trivia and statistical anomalies anyway. He seems much sharper today than he had been the first day after relapse.

For his own part, Alfredo also looks heaps better than when Marcus last saw him, battered, dehydrated, and left to die. Sherlock brightens substantially in Alfredo’s company.

It stings _just enough_ for Marcus not to be able to deny that it does. Marcus chastises himself for having any kind of negative response to Alfredo in general, but especially because he clearly makes Sherlock far more comfortable dealing with what he’s been through than Marcus can. He tries to hide his spurned feelings from Joan but doesn’t do a good enough job once they’re alone and driving to meet with Gregson.

He knows from experience that trying to keep secrets from Joan is like trying to keep secrets from Sherlock. Still, he wishes he’d been able to spare himself the embarrassment of the ensuing conversation.

“Alfredo’s an addict, too. He used to be Sherlock’s sponsor. There’s just less to explain.”

“I’m not jealous,” Marcus insists, which is such an obvious mistake he actually winces at himself from behind the wheel. “Okay, I know how that sounds.”

“Like you’re jealous. You shouldn’t be. Your relationship with Sherlock is your relationship with Sherlock. If it was like his and Alfredo’s or his and mine, then it wouldn’t be unique to the two of you.”

“I just…” He huffs and drops his head back against the seat at a red light. “He didn’t look happy to see me, the other day. I don’t…” He makes a face through the windshield at the license plate in front of him. “Not that he needs to be happy to see me right now, you know, but,” he sighs, quickly becoming agitated the more he can’t put his thoughts into words, “maybe he doesn’t want me around for this.”

Joan remains silent beside him for the next few streets until the crime scene looms into view. She waits for him to put the car in park before unbuckling her seatbelt.

“I’m not gonna answer that for him because it’s not my place, but you of all people should know you can’t make that decision for him.”

“Me of all people?”

She pauses with her car door open and one foot on the asphalt.

“He tried to do that to you after you were shot.”

Marcus follows her out of the car to the police tape and listens to Gregson’s breakdown of events. They look at the body and toss out a few theories. It feels more like work than it usually does.

~

It rains on the day Marcus meets Ms. Hudson. The sky is gray and the air freezing when she opens the door for him, takes his coat, and kindly tells him her name. A healthy combination of her warm smile and the roaring fireplace makes him forget about the rain soaking his collar or the chill trapped in his ears, nose, and cheeks.

“Sherlock requested that you leave your shoes at the door,” she tells him over her shoulder on her way back into the den where she’s rearranging the books on the shelves.

He crouches dutifully and undoes his laces. “Did he know I’d be around today?”

“I don’t think so.” Ms. Hudson concentrates on her work but doesn’t dismiss him. “It’s only this weather. So much of the city comes in on the bottoms of your shoes every day. I’m surprised he doesn’t make it a rule not to wear street shoes inside. It’d do wonders to keep these floors clean.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

She offers to get him something from the kitchen, but he refuses in favor of climbing the stairs in his socks to find Sherlock. He’s in the first room he tries.

“Ah. Detective Bell.” Sherlock tips his head back in the chair he’s sitting in to catch Marcus’ eyes. He looks down pointedly at his lack of shoes and hums agreeably. “Good. Ms. Hudson informed you of my preferences. She’s as close to a saint as ordinary people get, that woman. Very well then, do you have a file for me to look at?”

“Uh, what?”

“A file, Marcus,” Sherlock repeats, enunciating smoothly over the diphthong in _file_. “Do you have one? For the case.”

“When it got dropped into our laps a few days ago you couldn’t have been less interested in who did it or how.”

“Well that was when we thought it was vehicular manslaughter. Now we _know_ it’s not. Now it’s interesting. And more to the point, Jacob Morris, your victim, was a soon-to-be petrol magnate with a penchant for hunting endangered species. The bellend,” he adds under his breath. Not a second later he sits up straighter and makes a pinched, confused face at Marcus. “You didn’t bring a file, did you?”

“Nah I’m on my break,” he answers, narrowing his eyes at Sherlock’s enthusiasm, his energy.

“You made the trip here in the rain on your break and you don’t have a file with you.”

“When you say it like that.”

“How did I say it?”

Marcus sighs and scrubs a hand over his face. “This was a bad idea. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He starts to turn to go, flustered and out of his element, when Sherlock jumps buoyantly to his feet. The dark shadows in his face are still present but to a lesser extent than they have been. Sherlock doesn’t even look annoyed so much as he does perplexed. He gives a forceful shake of his head like he can’t pinpoint the words to formulate an intelligible question.

“You’re on your break.”

“…Yeah.”

“Would you perhaps…care for a…sandwich?” Sherlock ends the inquiry with a jerky flourish of his hand.

Marcus can’t help but smile. Sherlock takes it to mean ‘yes’ to his offer of a sandwich. He follows him back downstairs into the kitchen and they eat sandwiches. It’s surreal.

“We owe our plentiful sandwich-making resources to the combined powers of Watson and Ms. Hudson. They have equally undertaken the feat of keeping the fridge stocked, I’m sure, lest I go hungry and manically seek out more drugs with which to self-medicate.”

Marcus, because there apparently is a God somewhere, doesn’t choke on his food.

“And you, Marcus,” Sherlock adds because maybe there isn’t a God or maybe there is one and It just can’t save him from Sherlock’s scrutiny. “You’ve been checking in on me.”

He doesn’t sound or look angry. Perhaps boredom fits the matter-of-fact drawl to his declarations. Marcus chews on his cheek and presses his knuckles against his mouth, thinking. There are no excuses or reasons or apologies waiting to spill out of him.

“Yeah,” he says.

Sherlock looks at him, mildly intrigued by the simplicity of his answer. “Why?”

Marcus doesn’t shrug, but it’s a near thing. He also doesn’t squirm under Sherlock’s gaze, but that, too, is a damn near thing.

“I think about you a lot, ever since.”

A single wrinkle appears between Sherlock’s eyebrows. Marcus drops his gaze to the table, self-conscious and nervous to put something so vulnerable out there like that. It’s only fair, he thinks. Sherlock has been exposed since the news of his relapse broke; since he snapped at Marcus like the former had no right to pry into his business. Sherlock’s the best Marcus knows at prying, but he sometimes needs encouragement to get started.

“In what capacity?” he asks evenly. “You fear for my sobriety, is that it?”

“No, it’s not that.” Marcus shakes his head slowly, searching for the answer in the murky well of his thoughts. It hides from him. “I’m just…I’m here.”

“I know,” Sherlock tells him, using an obvious tone like he thinks Marcus is being dense.

“No, I know. I know you know. Just, I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. If that makes sense.”

Sherlock sits back in his chair and flutters his fingers so that the tips scrape repeatedly on the fleshy part just beneath his knuckles. He squints at Marcus and says, “I seem to recall a conversation we had about my social circles being far more active than yours.”

Marcus rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a magnet and I’m a fork. I remember.”

Sherlock stares at a spot on the table, expression soft. He hums once. “It’s strange to think of myself as the exception to your usual alacrity in social settings.”

“You can never just compliment me outright, can you? ‘You aren’t an idiot.’ ‘You’re usually charming, but not now.’”

Sherlock flicks his gaze from the table to Marcus and openly studies him. He places his chin in one hand.

“You, Marcus, are brilliant and charming and far removed from a fork.”

Marcus blinks and his face grows warm in such a way that he really doesn’t think he can blame the dull roar of the fireplace in the adjacent room. He looks away and presses his lips together, so completely, entirely out of his depth that he has no idea what to do with his face or his hands or least of all with his words.

“You look flummoxed,” Sherlock reports, perfectly composed and unbothered. “Haven’t been gone too long, have you?”

“Are you all right?” Marcus risks asking after a quick check of the time on his watch. He’s got a few minutes before he needs to barrel out of the brownstone and get back to the station. “You’re sort of all over the place today.”

A muscle in Sherlock’s jaw twitches. “Yes, well. I find myself staving off cravings that I had thought to be vastly diminished since the last time I gave myself over to them.”

“You’re jonesing right now.”

Sherlock’s hands clench into tight fists over his thighs. He says, “Quite.”

“Oh.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“No. That why you wanna help with the Morris case all of a sudden?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I want to help with the Morris case because now you’re in need of a murder weapon. I am, as you say, jonesing, not delusional.”

Marcus looks at Sherlock—really looks at him. Sherlock frowns.

“No, Marcus, I am not on drugs in this very moment.”

“Have you been? Since that day?”

Sherlock opens his mouth, stops himself, and unclenches his fists. He clasps them calmly together.

“You had best hurry back to work.”

Marcus dumbly checks his watch again and mouths, “Shit.”

Sherlock doesn’t flag him down or so much as call after him on his way back into the foyer to get his boots on. Once he’s shielded from the whipping rain by his car he sends a text.

_Thanks for the grilled cheese._

No reply comes.

~

“I was expecting my father the day you came to see me.”

Marcus stops with a forkful of pasta primavera halfway to his mouth. “Which day?”

It’s an honest question. Marcus has come to visit on many occasions since The Day of the Incident, also known colloquially as Relapse Day. It’s a subject that’s not been far from Marcus’ mind in the month following that day.

“The morning after Relapse Day,” Sherlock tells him, all loud, unforgiving brass in the middle of the tiny, quiet Italian place they’re dining at. “I was expecting my father. He never showed. Not unlike him, mind you—not even a little. I thought for certain he would, and as such, I was on my best behavior: agitated and strung out, yes, but mild-mannered as you like because that’s what father likes in the prodigal, drug-addicted son.”

Sherlock takes a long drink of his water and savagely gnaws a bite off the end of a breadstick.

“I should have known, naturally, that his distance was a test. He’s been in New York the entire time, having me watched.”

“You don’t think you might be a bit paranoid?”

“I know I’m not,” Sherlock mumbles, clearly not wanting to explain why. He flicks his fingers repetitively against the thickest part of his thumb. “I know I’m not because there isn’t a single purveyor of narcotics in this city who will sell to me directly, and I know they will not sell to me because I have been to see them all.”

Marcus sets his fork down and holds his napkin to his mouth. The slow seconds and sluggish minutes spring out ahead of him, scattered and uncontrollable and volatile. He isn’t waiting anymore.

“So did you…I mean, _have_ you used again?”

Sherlock chuckles and the sound of it is muted and desperate. He pinches the embroidered cloth napkin beside his plate and traces the intricate patterning with two fingers. His voice softens to something nearer to a whisper than normal speaking volume, but Marcus hears him just fine.

“I’ve informed Watson and Alfredo.” A deep grimace stretches itself taut over Sherlock’s mouth and his eyebrows furrow down. He doesn’t look up from the napkin or take his fingers away from the raised lines. “I only needed to tell you, and that proved to be a far more complicated task than I allowed myself to believe it would be.”

“Wait. _Were_ you high that day when Ms. Hudson was fixing your shelves?”

“She wasn’t fixing them. She was reorganizing my reading materials. It’s a completely different…” He trails off at the intent look on Marcus’ face. “No. Not that day.”

Marcus closes his eyes, wondering where to even begin and wondering what Joan and Alfredo have already said.

“I’m to return to Hemdale at the week’s end,” Sherlock tells him like it’s just some casual comment about the tagliatelle. “My father has issued an ultimatum, and as I am now further steeped in the rekindled flames of my addiction than I was at the beginning of my downward spiral, it’s only reasonable at this point to accept his terms.”

He doesn’t want to, but he asks anyway. “What are they?”

“Rehabilitation, or more of what I was like before.” Sherlock’s mouth twitches like he’s attempting to smile, but his eyes are too wide and too glassy for it to communicate anything but regret. His tongue darts out briefly between his lips. “I have no wish to be as I was, Marcus. Not ever again.”

Marcus nods a few times too many and looks down at his cooling pasta. His vision goes blurry on him and he had no idea until this moment, fighting back surprise tears, that he’d been carrying this disappointment with him much longer than just today. It doesn’t feel right to have it so close to his heart. He doesn’t feel worthy of it.

It occurs to Marcus as he’s looking at Sherlock, his friend, a brilliant but destructive human being, that he’s harbored this shame for Andre and for himself in his darkest moments. And he knows he feels it now for Sherlock because he can’t stand to let this low point define him—can’t allow it to be the beginning and the end of who he is because he contains so much more than just addiction or just magnetism or just genius.

Marcus covers Sherlock’s fidgeting hand with his own. The embroidered edges of the napkin press up beneath his thumb. Sherlock’s fingers go still.

“Then you go to Hemdale,” he says when he feels like he can speak again and when the tears have subsided. “And you fix it. And you come home. You won’t be who you were.”

Sherlock scrubs at his eyes with his remaining free hand and sniffs once loudly. He shakes his head a bit ruefully.

“You don’t know who I was.”

Marcus, for once able to say the right thing immediately, smiles small and squeezes Sherlock’s hand when it loosens and relaxes beneath his palm.

“I know you’re better than that now.”

All the parts of Sherlock’s face collectively lock up, as does the hand Marcus is currently holding. He nods and his lower lip protrudes just a touch before he whispers, “I am.”

“You are,” Marcus whispers back.

**Author's Note:**

> Written in one sitting again because that's apparently how I write Bellock. Why the hell are there still so few Bellock fics?? 
> 
> Sorry if I fucked up on the addiction front. It is highly likely that I fucked up on the addiction front.


End file.
